Stanford football

Now that the regular season of Harbaugh Year One is over, I'm wondering if it may be useful to compare this season to his trajectory at Stanford. We only have one data point at Michigan so far, but this may be fun for pure idle speculation. So far we have:

Stanford vs. Michigan

Year

Stanford

Michigan

Prior Season

1-11

5-7

Year 1

4-8

9-3

Year 2

5-7

???

Year 3

8-4

???

Year 4

11-1

???

For the sake of disucssion, let's assume that this 9-3 season is not a fluke ala Hoke, and that Michigan won't be back-sliding, or at most if the record does suffer, we would go no lower than 8-4 in the regular season. Perhaps the choice isn't simply binary, but for discussion sake, does our 9-3 season represent:

A) Harbaugh is "ahead of schedule" compared to Stanford and thus will get Michigan to the point where we have 10-2, 11-1 or 12-0 regular seasons somewhat regularly within the next 2-4 years? i.e., "We will be reaching euphoric heights and in the playoff conversation late in the year more often than not."

OR

B) Does our 9-3 season mean that--thankfully--Harbaugh has quickly "raised the floor" of our program back to our "traditional floor" of 8-4 or 9-3, but (unfortunately) that's basically it, and that we'll be back where we were back in the Carr era being somewhat content with 10-2 or 9-3 seasons & semi-regular victories over our big rivals? i.e., "At least we are past our existential crisis but will only be in the playoff conversation late in the year just once every 6-7 years & thus view that as a special treat vs. expected outcome."

Or some alternative mixture of the two?

DISCUSS

**Edited to make the Scenario A vs. Scenario B differences more clear.

So it's August, and football withdrawal is reaching a frenzy. As productive as the limited media access to Fall Camp will be for the players, it leaves us in an echo chamber to. . . well, I'm hearing predictions of 10-win seasons and maybe even better.

As I've said elsewhere on MGoBlog, I'm tempering my expectations of results. The coaching staff clearly knows their stuff, but they're making a lot of changes and to an extent that compromises some short-term gains. Consider it a young team in spirit, with the inevitable goofs and gaffes that will lose us some games until they figure it out. And yet, it's also time to be really excited. Because starting next month, no team is safe. Ask Pete Carroll.

With that in mind, I'm back to pick on Borges again (sorry Al), but in a more positive light -- looking ahead to the upcoming season. No, this isn't a preview of San Jose State, but a comparison to highlight what is to me the most undercovered and yet profound shift in program philosophy. In anticipation of what Michigan 2015 will look like, I revisited Stanford's 2007 upset of #1 USC.

"There was never a sense of, like, oh, it's the fourth quarter; oh, there's 85,000 people here; oh, this is the #1 team in the country; oh, we can drive down and beat 'em. All I'm thinking is, we've gotta make this drive down, we gotta go score. . ."-Tavita Pritchard

To be clear, the Stanford offense did NOT have a good game. 5-17 on third downs, 11/30 passing with a pick, and 2.2ypc rushing usually means you go home with your head down. And while there's been no shortage of words written or spoken about the improbable comeback, for as bad as the offense did that day, something struck me about the last drive. I find myself compulsively re-watching from 1:20:00 of this clip, not because it's exciting, but to compare it with a very different program philosphy:

"If you don't understand read progressions, footwork, timing and all that, you get paralysis through analysis. So there's carryover is what I'm saying. I don't care how much offense you decide to run, they're still running the same defenses, so unless you can talk the other guys into running the same defense every time, which I've never been able to do, it's always going to be somewhat difficult for the quarterback no matter how much you scale back the offense."
-Al Borges on backup QB Shane Morris

Hold that thought. Late in the fourth quarter, down a TD, Pritchard was facing 4th and 20. Harbaugh's calling in the play. And then this happens:

"I just remember being across the field, and [Harbaugh] yelling something to me. And I don't remember being able to hear it. . . I knew there could only be a couple of things, so I went back to the huddle, and I was like, 'OK, here's what we're going to do.'"
-Tavita Pritchard, Stanford backup QB

Let that sink in: In Stanford's do-or-die play of the game, their unheralded backup QB didn't have Harbaugh to tell him what to do. It was just him, in the middle of a deafening Coliseum, 41-point underdog against the #1 team in the country, effectively alone. This is basically the worst-case scenario for a Borges QB (worst-case scenario in general, really), but this is what a Harbaugh QB does in that situation:

"I remember keeping in an extra blocker. . . I was gonna make sure I could get this thing off."
-Tavita Pritchard

"Tavita eventually put it together with the information that he had, and was able to call the play."
-Jim Harbaugh

Sherman caught Pritchard's pass just beyond the first-down marker.

Maybe Pritchard is just the sort of cocky bastard (I mean that in a good way) to relish the situation, but he has to know he has the autonomy when he needs it. That comes from the head coach, which makes it an unfathomable outcome for a Hoke/Borges offense. Harbaugh is widely considered an innovative game-caller, but what I'm most geeked about is a program that will put the players in a position to dictate the game as needed -- not through talent, but through understanding of the game.

Stanford wasn't done, nor was USC. 1st-and-goal quickly became 4th-and-goal, Stanford's gains in the series rolled back by a substitution penalty. Well, we've been there before. What's the call, Al?

"We were pretty much going to stick with the plan. There was not going to be a lot of audibling in this game. . . we had designed the plan to block up to handle most of what they did, so we did not want to turn this into a chess game on the line of scrimmage."
-Al Borges

Needless to say, Stanford went in the exact opposite direction. With everything on the line against the #1 team in the country, the players changed the play again.

"Mark Bradford, me and Evan Moore, we're trying to fit it in the hole, but [USC] kept their three best defenders over there for three plays. "Mark is like, 'Man, I'm gonna switch to the other side,' because Ryan Whalen, a walk-on, was on the other side. We don't even look on the other side; we're just trying to fit it in the hole. So. . . we're like, 'All right.' You know. . . why not? This hasn't been working, so he switched to the other side."
-Richard Sherman

USC defended Bradford one-on-one in the corner, and he pulled in the game-winning TD.

If you're looking for the single biggest change from Hoke to Harbaugh, it's not the scheme, or the MANBALL, or the crazy plays or toughness or four-hour practices or a goddamn headset. Well, that's all part of it, but it's going to be guys who look like they're lost to guys who know what the hell they're doing. No, Al, it's not a chess match on the line of scrimmage because football players aren't pawns. They're people with brains, and those brains can be a huge on-field advantage. I liken the shift from guys who memorize sheets of music to musicians. I'm not looking forward to Harbaugh micromanaging the offense; I'm hoping that he'll do the exact opposite and field a team that opposing DCs won't be able to keep up with.

This was obviously a complicated relationship between Harbaugh and Doug Baldwin. Baldwin seemed to waver back and forth from not seeing eye-to-eye with Harbaugh and wanting to transfer to acknowleding that he had a positive impact on his maturation ... And now as a pro, he wishes him luck but then adds the "go Buckeyes" zinger at the end. May simply be a shot at him being the former coach of a current NFL rival but the guy doesn't seem to be able to make up his mind.

So question and a thought. Does anyone have any further background on what happened between Harbaugh and Baldwin (besides "who cares?")? To me, it seems like Baldwin knows full well that Harbaugh helped make him a better player and person, but is having a hard time coming to grips with fullly acknowledging it.

A moment comes when you first start listening to minimalist music—for some people it comes quickly, for some people it never clicks at all—when your perception of time changes. As a musician famously described his first exposure to a Philip Glass opera; his initial boredom was transformed as...

I began to perceive...a whole world where change happens so slowly and carefully that each new harmony or rhythmic addition or subtraction seemed monumental...

...he said as the rhythmic woodblock...no, it's Adams not Glass...the woodblock crack of the pulling Stanford guard's pads as he thumped the Oregon SAM out of the hole play after play after play after...

NO! I will NOT spend my Thursday evening in an altered state of consciousness. So I started using the media timeouts, and then the time between plays (well, at least when Stanford had the ball, which thankfully was just about always) to work on a project I'd started a few days earlier during the Gameboy diaries, pulling participation reports for all 125 FBS teams and pulling roster/bio information to get the classes of their starters on the o-line.

And some of you people think huddles serve no purpose.

Honestly, the Horse Wasn't Dead When I Started

The results are here, usefully tabled in a spreadsheet to save some work for the next sap that starts on one of these projects.

Of course, as I sat down at my computer to do some regression analysis on the data I opened the blog and saw Gandalf's diary covering most of what I was planning to do (and doing a better job of it I might add). But I was taking a slightly different tack and found a couple of wrinkles, so for the sake of the eight of you that are still interested I'll continue on....

First a couple of comments about the dataset (feel free to skip the rest of this section, but it might be important if anyone uses the data for further analysis). Gandalf took his data from depth charts at the ourlads.com scouting site; mine come from the starting lineup listed in each school's participation report in the official game stats for their most recent game against FBS competition (sometimes coaches play with their lineup for games they're treating as exhibitions, give a start to a loyal walk-on for example, so if the most recent game was against a Delaware State I pulled the lineup for the week prior).

The official reports have the virtue, or defect, of being precise accounts of who was on the field. Sometimes that was a problem because everyone doesn't actually use five offensive linemen all the time. Idaho started a game with four, presumably spreading the field with covered, ineligible tight ends and wide receivers. Somebody else came out heavy and listed six. There were also some schools that simply listed their linemen as “OL” without assigning specific positions.

Where possible I straightened those situations out by using the schools' published depth charts. When that didn't work either I looked at third-party depth charts and did my best to reconcile them with the actual starters. It's possible there are a couple of players out of position here, but I don't think it's material.

For teams, usually pistol teams, that flop their line, I assumed the tight end would line up to the right and assigned the quick tackle and guard to the left side and the strong tackle and guard to the right.

For obvious reasons, service academies don't redshirt players. If an academy lineman's bio showed a year in which he didn't see game action, I counted that year as a redshirt and subtracted the year from his class. The point after all was to look at experience, not remaining eligibility.

Additive and Multiplicative Measures of Experience

My starting point was two proposals in the Gameboy diaries. Gameboy himself proposed assigning a value to each player (one point for each year, half a point for a redshirt) and adding them (well, averaging them, which of course is the same thing but for scale). That average appears in the spreadsheet as the GLEM (Gameboy Line Experience Metric).

In a comment to one of the diaries reshp1 suggested an alternative: assigning a value to each player based on experience (conceived as the probability that the player in question will successfully carry out his assignment) and multiplying those values and subtracting the product from one to get the probability that an assignment will be busted on a given play. That probability appears in the spreadsheet as the RBI (Reshp Bust Index). It's basically the weakest-link theory with the additional recognition that anyone might turn out to be the weakest link on a given play.

I focused on the latter metric because conceptually it makes sense to me and because it wasn't treated in Gandalf's diary. Reshp1 pulled the probabilities out of the air, or his hat, or somewhere, but the analysis doesn't seem to be sensitive to the particular choices here. The values are in a lookup table on page 2 of the spreadsheet if anyone wants to play around with alternatives.

Before I go on, a sanity check on Reshp1's metric—a list of the ten youngest lines:

UCLA (7-2, 4-2)

Idaho (1-9)

California (1-9, 0-7)

Wake Forest (4-6, 2-5)

Eastern Michigan (2-8, 1-5)

Western Kentucky (6-4, 2-3)

Tulane (6-4, 4-2)

Maryland (5-4, 1-4)

Arkansas (3-7, 0-6)

Michigan (6-3, 2-3)

Not a list you want to be on; those are some bad teams right there, combining for a 16-37 record in their respective conferences and that's flattering because it leaves out independent Idaho, who's probably the worst of the lot. (You can point to UCLA if you like as proof that, if everything goes right, you can survive starting multiple freshmen. Arkansas fans are probably pointing to Michigan and saying the same thing.)

The Running Game

Sanity check #2 is to redo Gandalf's work, but with Reshp's metric. Here's a graph of yards per carry vs. RBI:

That looks familiar. R2 is .058; the correlation coefficient is -.24 (these coefficients will all be negative because RBI is smaller for more experienced lines). And if we strip out the tackles and just look at the interior?

R2 is .084, the correlation coefficient is -.29, and it's not a coincidence that this looks an awful lot like Gandalf's chart using “youngest interior lineman”.

Weakest link, check. Experience matters more on the interior than at the tackles, check.

Offensive Efficiency

But what I really wanted to do was to look at the impact of o-line experience on an offense as a whole. To do that I've used the offensive component of the Fremeau Efficiency Index, which looks at all offensive drives (except for clock-kills and garbage-time drives) and compares the results to expectations based on the starting field position. By its nature it's pace-adjusted and independent of the effect of the team's defense; they also apply a strength of schedule adjustment.

Here's the chart:

R2 is .026, the correlation coefficient is –.16. The effect’s not as large, but a young line impacts the whole offense, not just the run game.

It made some sense that in the running game experience would matter more in the interior than at the tackles since it's an interior lineman that makes the line calls and the assignments tend to be more complicated inside. It wasn't so clear that this would still hold when the passing game was added in:

but that's what we find. The correlation is greater when we only look at the interior. R2 is .048, the correlation coefficient is -.22.

A lot was made in Gandalf's diary, and especially in the comments, about the low R2 values here, which were seen as a demonstration of the relative unimportance of experience vs. other factors, like coaching.

I see it differently. This is an extremely diverse universe of teams we're looking at here. There are differences between Michigan and Eastern, or between Ohio State and Ohio U., that can't ever be overcome by something as simple as inexperience on the line. A lot of the scatter in these charts is just a matter of big programs being big and small programs being small. Given those enormous differences in baseline levels of the various FBS teams it's amazing to me that we could see anything like 5-8% of a performance difference being credited to any one team demographic, especially when the difference is measured using an SOS-adjusted metric like Fremeau.

And the slopes of these trend lines aren't small. The expected oFEI difference between 2012 Michigan and 2013 Michigan is .32; the actual difference is .197. The expectation, just correcting last year's performance for the youth on the field this year, was for a worse offense than we've actually seen.

Put another way, if you use that trend line to adjust for this year's lack of experience, add the missing .32, Michigan's offense goes to 19th in the nation, right behind Stanford and Louisville. UCLA turns into Oregon. Eastern becomes Bowling Green and maybe English keeps his job. Everybody's happy.

Good Teams are All Alike, Every Bad Team is Bad in its Own Way

I thought I'd try to get a handle on that by comparing each team's performance to the baseline they've established historically. I've averaged the oFEI's for each program for the five-year period from 2008-2012, then calculated the deviation of this year's performance from that average.

Basically, we're now looking at year-to-year deviations in performance within each program.

On the one hand, this gets rid of the scatter due to the vast discrepancy in baseline performance expectations from the top to the bottom of the division.

On the other hand, this also filters out any effect from programs like Wisconsin whose strength largely comes from the fact that they always field powerful, experienced lines. There's not much year-to-year variance there—they're always old, always good.

So it's possible we won't see any bigger correlation here than before...

...what happened? R2 is .009. Two-thirds of the effect is now gone. (A result, by the way, that's consistent no matter what metrics I use for line experience.) Apparently, only a third of the effect we’re looking at is a matter of one-off bad seasons due to a young line; most of the effect is systematic, inherent in particular programs. It's almost as if there were a correlation between poor past performance and current youth, and that's because there is:

There's the missing two-thirds. Historically (well, over the last five years anyway) bad teams are on the left, good programs on the right. There's less current youth (lower Bust Index) as you move right.

A look back at the teams listed earlier provides a clue. It's a mix of historically bad programs like Eastern, struggling FCS converts like Idaho, and programs that have suffered some sort of recent calamity, the kind that makes you decide to hire John L. Smith to be your substitute teacher for a year. Some had horrible recruiting, some had retention problems…each one has had its peculiar issues but every one of them is a program in disarray—some recovering, some not. Teams don’t field multiple freshmen because they want to; they do it because things fell apart.

We'll know more if someone does the study suggested in the comments to Gandalf's diary, looking at overall roster depth instead of just the age of the starters, but I think what's happening here is that the Wisconsin effect is the dominant effect in the study. Good programs don't suffer from youth on their lines because (a) it doesn't happen to them and (b) when it does, it's not a sign of weakness. When Andrus Peat finds his way to the top of the depth chart as a sophomore it's because he's beaten out multiple upperclassmen and won the position. When Kyle Bosch find his way to the top of the depth chart it's by default; the juniors and seniors he's supposed to be competing against aren't on the roster.

I think the next thing I might try, if I were of a mind to keep flogging this, is to do something so straightforward and blunt as to look for a correlation between offensive efficiency and the number of scholarship upperclass o-linemen on a roster (more telling than the percentage, I would guess).

This is a flyer that Stanford sends out to their football recruits. Personally, I think it's pretty awesome. This, in my mind, isn't negative recruiting, it is only showing the power of a Stanford degree. Now I know that this isn't for the average football player with a degree or anything like that, but I still think it is impressive and is a very valid way to recruit and can bring up some interesting discussion at least.